After owning my Printrbot Simple for over a year, I have finally had the time to sit down and start calibrating it, resulting in the rather badly photographed second print. Apologies for the quality of the images. All in all it is a slightly better print than my first attempt with clear filament, but there is a lot of room for improvement.
Still quite a few issues to resolve, the major one being alignment of the print bed and the resulting adherence of the first 6 -10 layers.
Layer adhesion also seems to be at least partly a result of slow filament extrusion during the initial stages of printing.
Bed alignment at this point however may be a lost cause.
As a result of evaporative air conditioning, it looks like the printer may have absorbed some moisture and warped slightly.
The Y-axis has a very slight, but noticeable downward tilt.
The Z-axis endstop screw is now fully screwed in to prevent the hot end from hitting the print bed where previously it had a good 2-3cm of travel.
And finally, the print bed is nearing the limits of useable adjustment at full Y-axis extension.
As much as I had always planned to use this printer as a learning experience/testbed, money prevents me from being able to upgrade to a more “plug and play” printer.
So it looks like in the immediate future, I will have to see what I can do to compensate for the newly induced flaws.
Looks to hot and could use a fan to cool the print for starters.
It has a fan, and I have already tried to lower my indicated temps to 185 degrees, however it automatically defaults to 200 when I start a print, and I can’t seem to get that to change no matter what setting I adjust.
If you are using Repeiter go into the printer settings, it is by the red EASY MODE button and set the temp in there.
Already did that. Also played around with the settings in Slic3r. Still starts out at 200 degrees.
Also, turns out my Y-axis is more tilted than it looks. At full Y extension the print bed is too high, but can’t get any lower, and at full retraction the print bed is too low but cant get any higher.
Short of a complete tear down/rebuild, I don’t think I will be getting any even halfway decent prints out of this thing.
There is the temp setting in Slic3r, i guess you have set that one also.
Yep, tried that, still got 200 degrees.
However I just used the setup wizard instead of changing the setting manually, and I now get the selected temperature. Go figure.
Well, I am now printing at 185 degrees, and the bottom looks a bit iffy but massively improved over the previous version even with the misalignment.
Fingers crossed for the next 10 minutes.
https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/112373682547757345912/albums/6100044741619007841
This should be the comparisons between my last two prints.
Latest on the left, previous on the right.
Still not exactly ideal, and there is something weird going on on top, but the two prints are worlds apart.
That link must be private.
Right, it should hopefully be public now
Getting better, still looks to hot.
Yeah, I think I might be done for the evening though.
Doesn’t help the first few layers that I can’t get the bed square with the y-axis 
Like @Wayne_Friedt said it looks too hot. Slow the speed down and drop the temp on the hotend if you are running over 200c. But don’t drop it a lot, maybe just 5 c. I don’t want to copy what the others have said but a fan is great as well.
And @Hifza_Sarfraz has now been reported. Don’t click on the link.
Have played around with temperatures a bit, and currently printing at 175 degrees is providing much stronger inter-layer adhesion.
170 degrees results in no extrusion at all.
Issue now is getting it to stick to the bed. Got half way through a print and popped loose, ended up stuck to the hotend getting printed on in one spot.
Have also tried playing around with the machine as a whole to try and fix the print bed/Y-axis alignment, and it doesn’t look like I am going to be able to make much of a difference.
@pave_spectre you are probably gonna want to run up your flow rate once you get the hotend set to the correct gap between itself and the bed. Once you get that set do a test print that has a large bottom and stop it after the first layer. If there are gaps between lines or it’s super stringy you are gonna want to run up your flow rate in your slicer. I use Cura and it’s very easy to change in it. Then try the print again and see how the bottom layer has changed. I just added a fan to my hotend and after having it set perfectly at 100 flow rate I now have to run it higher to accommodate for the cooling.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-mD8EEBDI1w8/VKkNs-O6kWI/AAAAAAAAAag/CeXUOT02l50/w426-h757/2015%2B-%2B1
Just for the hell of it I am in the process of trying something a little bigger.
You can see the result of the varying bed height here, where the bed is a good distance from the hotend you can see it’s relatively smooth.
As the distance between bed and hotend increase it becomes quite wiggly, and imprecise.
Short of adding a significant counterweight to the back of the Y-axis, there isn’t a lot I can think of to restore squareness back in to the printer.
Will just have to put some pennies away to either get some replacement parts, or just upgrade to a whole new printer.
